Anthem lets you pick out the materials covering your Javelin

[Nergal]

 

Anthem’s Javelins – the suits you’ll be wearing as you fly around looking for alien spider gods to destroy – are remarkably customisable. In a recent live stream, BioWare developers showed off the character customisation options, and it turns out you’ll be able to fine-tune your Javelin down to picking out fabrics and metals to cover your suit with.

Each Javelin is broken down into several regions, and each one has certain hard and soft surfaces. But these specifications are only a guide – you can decide whether you want to use a soft fabric for a flowing cape, or to give it a high-gloss metallic sheen. You’re also going to be able use the full colour wheel for each component of the Javelin’s appearance, granting a tremendous amount of customisability to your in-game appearance.

The ability to pick out your own textures is the headline here. You can select from a wide variety of metal plates, fabrics, and leather textures for your Javelin, so if you think a piece of armour would look better in a zig-zagging cloth pattern, that’s there to choose and then colour however you like. Then you can go even further by deciding how weathered everything looks.

Naturally, this means it’s going to take a bit of work to get Anthem’s Javelins to look good (and it’s easy to imagine some players working out the ugliest colour and materials patterns possible). This isn’t like slapping on a bunch of pre-designed Destiny 2 shaders. However, you’ll have a bit of help, and armour sets like the pre-order Legion of Dawn bonus will have certain materials specially marked to provide some guidance.

BioWare’s developers pointedly don’t discuss how much of this customisation is available off the bat – clearly, some of it will be unlocked as players work their way through the game. And it sounds as though other customisation options may be made available for sale in the form of microtransactions.
Still, it’s a high level of control over your look, and it’ll be interesting to see what kinds of combinations players come up with when Anthem comes out February 22.